Welcome To Fear*

You wake. The first decision of the new day waits - getting out of bed. And off to the bathroom you go. But you can’t take a shower as the water is filled with female hormones from the contraceptive pill, and you can’t use soap because it causes eczema, or brush your teeth due to the dangers of fluoride and the dangerous plastic materials in your toothbrush. You can’t use mouthwash either as you've read it causes mouth cancer. All you can do is peer at your ablutions, worried they contain some hidden omen of your mortality. 

You dress, carefully and guiltily, thanks to the highly inflammable materials used and the poor children in the third world living in squalid conditions who sew your clothes together. Breakfast follows. Cereal and milk. But the cereal which is high in fibre is high in salt and the one high in flavour is packed with sugar and fat. Your coffee is made by a company with dubious practices in the third world, which you don't drink anyway as its full of caffeine, leaving you to decide whether to take your chances with tea made with hormone soaked water, or milk filled with DDT and artificial fertilizer. 

The journey to work offers no relief. You daren’t get the train, as it’s a walk down a dark, badly lit street, where you could be accosted by rapists and muggers, or trip on the badly maintained pavements, or fall over some inappropriately placed signage. The bus is out as well; all that coughing and spluttering from your fellow passenger’s guarantees you’ll be infected by some strain of super-flu, assuming you survive the knife brandishing hoodies, you’ll share the journey with. So you take the car, trying to ignore the likelihood of Legionnaires disease brewing in the window washer bottle, and the other drugged or drunk drivers in their uninsured, insurance write-off cut and shut cars, complete with counterfeit tyres that you share the road with, don't get you today. And that you avoid the fraudsters who deliberately break on roundabouts so they can claim whiplash injuries on your insurance. Assuming, of course, you’re simply not hauled out of your car by hijackers posing as newspaper sellers. 

And once you've made the fraught journey to work? You turn on your PC. And as you are bathed in the faint radioactive glow from your monitor, you remember that the only thing protecting you from the poisonous heavy metals which it contains is its thin plastic case, covered in lead based paints, made in a factory by people earning 5p a month, for a 100 hour week. But you console your self, at least they have a job. With the cuts and stuff you’re lucky if you still have one, and certainly when you lose it, as you inevitably will, you’ll fall down the between the cracks in the welfare system, cast out of your cowboy builder built house because the miss sold payment protection insurance you took on your mortgage doesn’t cover your repayments. Unable to afford anywhere to live, you end up destitute on the street, easy prey for sex traffickers and the methadone addicts. Which, given your productivity has collapsed due to the RSI from using your keyboard incorrectly, combined with the lower back pain from you slouching in your unsupportive seat, seems your inevitable fate. 

Lunchtime arrives. You daren’t eat any of the sandwiches Tesco sell – too fatty, salty or sugary, or any of their wax coated, pesticide treated, flown in fruit. An although their water is “pure” it comes in a bottle made from plastic, which will, in a couple of years time, be fished out of a blow hole of a drowned Sperm whale and traced back to you, your finger prints having surviving the poisoned seas intact.


You’d surf the internet at lunchtime but with the groomers and the scammers trying to steal your identity so they can spend all your money on Chupa Chups and Monster Munch you decide not to. And no I won’t change the printer toner either lest it explodes or I inhale any of its carcinogenic toner powder. And certainly I won’t change the paper. What if I got a paper cut which then became infected by an antibiotic resistant superbug?


The trip home is an equally hazardous adventure – dark evenings, road rage drivers in unsafe cars, high on Pine Magic Tree fumes. Home offers no solace. You turn the TV on and see a list of new things to be fearful of – parcels from Yemen, hidden fees, pension shortfalls, dirty hospitals, dangerous dogs, knife crime, unhygienic restaurants, alcohol, global warming, deforestation, overpopulation, water shortages, trans fats, freak weather, lone gunmen, internet, the rise of the right, the rise of the left, the rise of the middle, music, video games, ra-ra skirts, platform heels, indoor toilets, outdoor toilets and the rest of the wearying, predictable, unending menu of fear mongering which now passes for the “News”.

Calling it quits you retire for another restless night – worried the smoke alarm won't work or that you'll be consumed by voracious bed bugs while you slowly choke on the allergens in house dust mite faeces. 

Worst of all? You know, come tomorrow, they'll have new things for you to be afraid of.


*Yes I've managed to work in DJ Shadow reference.